Ray Wang

Ray Wang is a Ph.D. candidate in Astronomy and Astrophysics at Michigan State University, where he works with Professor Megan Donahue to study the hot baryonic gas that threads its way through clusters of galaxies.

He is part of the Local Volume Complete Cluster Survey (LoVoCCS), the largest census to date of galaxy clusters in the z ~ 0.1 local Universe. Using measurements of the thermal Sunyaev–Zel’dovich effect from the Planck satellite and the Atacama Cosmology Telescope, Ray explores the thermal pressure that helps bind these vast cosmic structures.

Ray is broadly interested in multi-wavelength analyses of galaxy clusters, seeking to pin down their mass, temperature, density, and the subtle links among these key properties. His current work also includes measuring the velocity dispersion of LoVoCCS clusters and examining Chandra X-ray data from the ACCEPT 2.0 (Archive of Chandra Cluster Entropy Profile Tables) sample.

Ray earned his Bachelor of Science degree with honors in Astronomy and Astrophysics from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where he also studied galaxy clusters with Professor Christopher Miller.

Outside of his research, Ray is an avid reader, drawn especially to Japanese and South Korean literature. Recently, he has been getting lost in the words of Kim Ae-ran and Han Kang.